The Glass Castle #3

Why does Walls use repetition?

Many times within the book, Walls repeats the phrase "us kids." She uses this whenever she talks about herself along with her brother and sisters. The book is oozing with Wall's early childhood misconceptions and ignorance. By using just this one phrase, Walls is able to clump all of the children together in one category, while leaving the adults in another. This amplifies the contrast she sees between the parents and children. Her parents are very different from the other members of the family and from one another. They are both very unique, her mother is extroverted and spunky, while her father is more quiet and reserved. Walls spends a lot of time contrasting her two parents, but she does not do the same for describing the children. It seems that from her point of view, all the children are very alike and do not posses very identifiable trait differences. By repeating the phrase "us kids" she is implying that the children act almost as one unit, that identifying them as separate people would be useless. I can only speculate as to why Walls chose to do this. It seems that she would do the opposite and place more description into herself and her siblings, but I think she does this to emphasize the impact that both parents have on her life. She begins the book with a description of her parents when Walls is an adult. So perhaps she is trying to contrast the parents she knows from her childhood and the parents that she knows as an adult.